


Shades of White

by CrossedBeams



Category: A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
Genre: A Streetcar Named Desire, Angst, Character Development, Deleted Scenes, F/M, Gen, Prequel, Sequel, Tennessee Williams - Freeform, literary characters, lost moments
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 12:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7267492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedBeams/pseuds/CrossedBeams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of ficlets exploring Blanche's life before and after the events in Steetcar. Standalone, play compliant and tagged with any warnings on a chapter by chapter basis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Starched Sheets

**Author's Note:**

> One year after Streetcar closes....  
> Rating - G

_“I’d like to make my call please? Magnolia 9047.  Mrs Stella Kowalski please…. I can wait.”_

There’s a wrongness to the drape of her red silk against the starch-white synthetics of the ward. Something that calls to mind those dusty rooms in museums where once proud butterflies lie impaled and fading on grey papers that slowly drain their colour. She knows how it feels to be a specimen, the unseen pressures of being on display. How fast the glorious spectacle can turn into gaudy desperation when magic and youth begin to fade and the wires and workings start to show. 

She hopes she has a little magic left. On quiet evenings she draws to her all the souls of this sterile place that still have the capacity to wonder; pulling them close to the campfire of her imagination as she paints bold colours and wistful lies across the blankness of their existence. Even the staff sometimes creep in, pretend disapproval never quite reaching the child in their eyes as she weaves her beautiful fantasies,

_‘Why honey, you never saw a sunset so pretty as those Chinese silks! He swore he’d keep bringing them until he found the exact shade of my eyes and all he wanted paying was one sweet kiss on that far-off day.’_

Out in the world there was no place for a woman like this; someone too reckless to be rich and too splendid to be poor. But she doesn’t belong in here either. Not anymore. Not really. 

At first she had needed the quiet. She stared through the days and screamed in the night; pitiful, desperate cries, tearing at the air and the restraints that stopped her from running from the monsters of her stories which prowled close in the sober darkness. In time she found words to tell the doctors their names and their cruelties, writing them one-by-one into the tragedy of her past and ending those chapters with a heavy, hard-won full-stop. That book, like the wounds those men left, would probably never close but it would go on. 

She would go on.

Now that she has swapped her liquor for their tablets, the nights come quietly and the days grow long. The unused harnesses hang harmlessly from bed that now frames, rather than restrains her unconscious form. Sometimes when she tells stories she absent-mindedly plays with them, tugging and testing at their resolve as her mind carries her where her feet cannot. These are relics of a madness that brought her here and an anchor she cannot pull up alone.

_‘I was named for the springtime you know? Blanche means white and Dubois, well that means “of the woods” _I think maybe in another life I could have been a wood nymph,_  my mother always said I belonged in the countryside on a sweet spring morning!‘_

Perhaps this is just another story but this one has the feel of truth to it. Slim and pale as a birch sapling there is a strength behind her delicacy, something that in moments makes you believe she could bend and slip free from the canvas straps and the steel frames of the ward. It’s the same strength that keeps her standing tall and proud as those around her curl into themselves, that drives her weekly down the corridor, bright against the white tiles, to where the phone sits waiting.

_‘My sister was named for the stars because she was the brightest little baby you ever saw. Not that I remember much. I was only a baby myself when she was born you see. But I sometimes wonder if maybe they got us mixed up, her feet always had an easier time staying on the ground than mine and I have an awful habit of having my head in the clouds!’_

Every week she walks that corridor and makes that call. Every week she makes the approach, smiling at the orderlies she passes, face serene, hair coiffed and shoulders back, as if her presentation can change the outcome and set her free. In a fairy-tale world it could happen. She could call and they would hear the clarity of her voice and the sobriety of her intentions and the curse would be lifted, the chains unlocked and she could walk out and back into the arms of her family and happy ever after.

_‘Yes I’m still here. Perhaps she didn’t hear the phone, she has a baby you see. Would you call again please?’_

But this is reality.

This is the lonely vigil of a woman who marks off endless days in empty weeks telling stories to strangers just to fill the time between her Sunday phone calls. For her, reality is a cold handset in a stale corridor. It is the endless ringing of a phone that never gets answered. Reality is the whitening of knuckles around the coiled cord.

Reality is the click of failure. The pity of the operator.

_‘One more time. Please just try one more time.’_

There are never any stories the night after the call. The red robe lies crumpled, a bloody stain on the floor, a discarded wrapper for the woman whose world moved on without her.

There is a wrongness to the drape of red silk in a place like this.


	2. Moonlight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sixteen year-old Blanche sneaks out one night to meet Alan Grey.

‘You shouldn’t be here Blanche’.

His voice drifts from the opaque shadow under the willow tree, a cadence as familiar to me as the planes of his face in sunlight or the ridges of his fingers between my hands. I know him so well. Alan. The boy I watched grow into a man from behind the rim of my summer hat, sat one Sunday pew away. I gave him my heart before I knew what it was for and he’s held it gently ever since, as though he’s afraid to bruise it.

He is afraid now. Afraid of what will happen if my family discover I am gone and find me here in the moonlight with a man, night air on my nightdress and everything  learned in Sunday school tucked back in my empty bed. Afraid of what I have risked to come to the place we only visit in sunlight and in company.

As my eyes grow used to the starlight I see a silhouette unfold itself from the darkness and step towards me, hand outstretched. I clasp it, feeling suddenly naked at the familiarity of skin on skin with nobody here to witness but I am not afraid, of his touch or of the consequences. I grew up hearing stories of fallen women who gave themselves to men and were lost but I don’t think I believe them any more. I am not lost when I am with Alan, if anything I have found myself in the moments we share. He needs me and I love him. How can it be sinful to share my heart, my hopes and my secrets with a kindred spirit. His lips on mine would not be the devil’s work but one more way to communicate when darkness threatens and soft words won’t reach the edges of the moment.

I have escaped to an imagined future but Alan is still in the present, drawing me back towards the safety of Belle Reve and away from time alone with him. 

‘Stay a moment, just to talk!’ I plead, digging my heels into the grass until he stops, my insistence dulling his urgency until it fades into the night. When he speaks again I can hear propriety and duty fighting against the promise of starlit confidences.

‘You have to get home Blanche, before they find you gone’, is all he can manage.

‘Don’t they say absence makes the heart grow fonder?’ I tease him with poetry, his preferred language and when he laughs I twirl away from him. The tension of our linked hands and the momentum of my movement carry me close to him and I still with the tip of my nose to his chin. He sighs at the closeness, hands spanning the back of my head and he presses his lips to my forehead, branding me his. My arms around his waist recognise the familiar weight of his notebook in his pocket; he always comes here to write.

‘Will you read something to me?’ I ask him, moonlight making me boldly believe that perhaps this time he will share his words with me. But a cloud blocks the stars in his eyes and he sighs.

‘Blanche, they’re… they’re very personal… intimate even. It wouldn’t be proper.’ His excuse is a delicate one. He never just tells me no like my father and brothers do, instead he always wants to save me or spare me from something. Tonight though I am reckless and I don’t want to be protected. 

‘I don’t care if they’re intimate! I’m sixteen now and not a child’ and with that I reach into his coat and snatch his notebook. 

‘Blanche’, Alan warns, something in his tone suddenly taking on the weight of the two years he has on me, scolding the naughty child. ‘Give it back now.’

Now that we’ve stepped out of the shadow of the tree there’s a thin wash of moonlight on his skin and I marvel again at how God could make someone so beautiful and then bear to part with him. There’s tension in his brow that I have put there and I hate to upset him so I give in, returning his book of secrets and giving up on finding within in it the key to his mind. For tonight at least.

‘Won’t you just read me one poem’, I plead, ‘And don’t tell me they’re no good. I’ve heard you speak about music and art and family and that was poetry enough. I just want to see the world through your eyes for a few seconds, to be close to you. Always to be close to you!’ And now all the gaiety has drained from my voice, now I have asked him for what I truly want. To be his confidante and confessor and to be always at his side.

For a few seconds we are silent and he looks at me with a strange light in his eyes, as if deciding whether I am temptation or salvation. Then he sighs and pulls me close to his chest, a brief snatch of an embrace before he weaves his fingers in mine and begins to walk us back towards Belle Reve.

‘You’re not in the poems Blanche’, he tells me, continuing as disappointment begins to bloom in my chest. ‘I tried to write about you so many times but you’re more than words… you’re… you’re light itself. Not moonlight, that would be too cold but you don’t have the sun’s relentless glare either. I think you’re the last light of day, the evening star and the setting sun all in one. That moment when the sky starts to darken but the light holds on. Everything white suddenly glows, fighting back the shadows for those last few moments of the day and the world becomes crisp and clear and beautiful. That’s what you are. The light that hangs on when all the others go out. You don’t give up on finding lightness in anyone. You haven’t given up on me, not even on the blackest of days. Even when you should.’

I have to swallow the lump in my throat to answer him. Nobody has ever seen me like that, seen me as more than a prize or a dutiful daughter. I wish I had some poetry, some magic to give him back but all I manage is cliched promises

‘I could never give up on you. I _will_ never give you up.’ 

When I find his eyes I see my tears reflected in his own and I watch him crumple. I have never seen a man cry before and his sobs grow steadily louder, rocking first his body and then mine as I cling to him and try to anchor him through the storm of his emotions. When he quiets he is somehow smaller, younger in my arms, head bent to my shoulder as his breath steadies. 

‘I believe you,’ he tells me. ‘But I wish you would give up on me Blanche. You deserve much more in a man than I can ever hope to be. If I were to marry you…’

He trails off into distracted thought, unconscious of my heart which has fled my chest and is poised to either take flight or plummet, shattered to the ground. Agonising beats pass before he continues.

‘I know that you want me to marry you Blanche. And I want you to have everything you’ve ever wanted. I just… I just worry that the consequence of my good fortune in winning your hand would end up being your happiness. I don’t know if I could make you happy. I don’t even know how to make _me_ happy.’ 

‘But we could find out together Alan! That’s what marriage is. My parents don’t approve but I don’t believe that my parents understand that a relationship can or should be happy. So many aren’t, but we could be. We know better than to put anything between us, to lie and to deceive and posion everything good in each other. We’re friends and I -  I want you more than I care about the consequences. Whatever they might be. I’d run away with you tonight. If that’s what you wanted. No more tea parties and church picnics and sideways glances. We could go away! Just us two together and we could be happy.’  And as I pour my dreamy futures into his lap I see his shoulders begin to lift, borne upwards by my enthusiasm.

‘You really believe we could?’ his voice has a lightness and hope to it that I haven’t heard in years and I catch his face in my hands and press my lips sweetly, impulsively to his.

‘I do. I’ve loved you since we were children and I’d follow you anywhere. To the ends of the earth or even to the gates of hell’.

He pulls back at that and with his hands framing my face I see for just a second the perfect opposite of the giddy happiness that has replaced the blood in my veins. I see a dark, heavy sadness woven into every fibre of his being even as he tries to blink it away. His thumbs paint imaginary tears on my cheeks as he tells me,

‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’ 


End file.
